ELDEN RING

First time playing a From Software game

Genre: RPG
Platform: PC
Release Date: 2022

Well after all the hype surrounding this game I have to give it a try. The problem is I already know what I am getting myself into and really I don't know where to start. So let's start at beginning. On what is this game all about. It's basically a ring got broken and divided into bad guys and pieces of the ring makes people into beings called The Tarnished. Ok you got me. I wasn't even paying attention to the story anyway. 

This is a souls game from the makers where their art is making games difficult in nature. There is no sugar coating it. Elden ring is hard and there are bosses around every corner that will make you die multiple times again and again. I love the combat with a small caveat. I put on cheat engine to run with god mode on and one hit kill. I could decided to off that but after that I got bored.  Since you start of as a small level character and you need to slowly needs to level up by killing anything you see to get runes. Runes are use to level up your character. It is a basic RPG trope. The more runes you get the more your character levels up. The harder the bosses the more rewards you'll take. But what this game is most known for is the crushing difficulty when you lose. When you lose you will lose all the runes that you collected and you will have the chance to get it again unless you died before that and then you are out of luck. 

As you can see from the map*. The game is huge and there are a lot do and see. You'll spend hours exploring either by walking or with your horse torrent (which I suspect a lot of PC players will do if they want to check out this game before buying it) There are a lot of points of interest that you can go and you will have you "oh my god" moment every step of the way. Well that's about all the nice things I can say about this game that critics are calling masterpiece in game design 

Okay now comes the bad part. Aside of the difficulty of combat which I am not blaming them since it's a design choice. This game doesn't actually give you anything. You are basically there all by yourself. This makes a lot of people who doesn't have all the time in the world (like me) frustrated on where to go next. Some times we just want to have a clear path saying you should go here next or you should do this. But this game makes it super difficult by actually sending you on fetch quests on finding something without actually telling you what makes what goes. I think a lot of players who in my mind are blind thinking that this game is great. This game is actually an ultimate time waster by asking you to go round and round until you have the right key or something to make the game go. Unlike Zelda there is a clear goal in the end. You can go anywhere you see on the map. Have some fun with it and when you are ready you can go and face the final boss. Over here is different since you are encourage to explore and see where it leads you. They make the game hard to navigate since a lot of places are block by doors, chasms and keys that you need to find

Which brings me to the thing why I don't think I'll ever will like a souls game. This game is build upon mechanics upon mechanics upon mechanics. There is a lot of things you need to learn like weapon loadout, spells, how heavy your armor sets is, all the items and crafting. They do teach you this but there is a lot of information overload when it comes to this. It all can seem a bit to overwhelming for me. 

So that is conclusion of my review. I don't see this game getting as high praise as it does since a game to be the greatest of all time needs to appeal to the masses (or maybe not). But I know that this game doesn't deserve a 10/10. The problem is that the people who review these games are die hard fans of games like this and it can be misleading to the rest of the common folk. Like me I played with cheats and I still had a great time after 20 hours it has given me but after that I felt uninspired to go anywhere since I am lost and this is too complicated to be considered a good time. Will I revisit this game again. Probably when I get a second monitor and probably in a couple more years you will get me to revisit this game. Or probably not. I don't know. But for now I give this game an E-Rank. Since the E stands for Elden itself... This game doesn't need to be easy but at least accessible to people who don't have time to burn to spend all year to be the elden lord

*Credit to Powerpyx.com